


this bird has flown

by secondaudrina (firstaudrina)



Category: Gossip Girl (TV 2007)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22354036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/secondaudrina
Summary: Moving in with Blair is a mistake, but it's the kind of mistake Dan doesn't mind making these days.
Relationships: Dan Humphrey/Blair Waldorf
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	this bird has flown

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Season 6.

(Sometimes over the summer, sitting under the hot Italian sun, the back of his neck and his ears getting sunburned, Dan would write stories he never let Georgina see. He used real names in these too but they weren't fit for publication, closer to fantasy than he's ever edged, and he's ashamed of writing them.

 _Blair freckles in the sun_ , he wrote once, _and he loves her so much it actually hurts_.)

Moving in with Blair is a mistake, but it's the kind of mistake Dan doesn't mind making these days. "Moving in" is a loose term, anyway, for dragging his one bag of summer clothes around and sleeping in Serena's sheets.

In the morning Blair perches on the end of his bed and won't give him coffee until he sits up, rubbing hands over his face. She smiles slightly at his rumpled hair and reaches over to smooth it, says things like, "Oh, Humphrey, what am I ever going to do with you?"

She lays out his clothes, wrinkling her nose at the selection, and then goes off to transform herself from the soft, sleepy Blair of the mornings to something with a harder edge and a headband. Dan waits in his room until she's done, or wanders through the bathroom to sit on her bed alternately reading a magazine and watching her do her makeup. Then they go have breakfast together.

Blair goes to work and Dan writes. Blair comes home and they have dinner and then watch a movie, leaning back against her headboard with Blair's head on his shoulder. It would be perfect, except. It would be everything Dan wanted, except, except.

Dan is getting up to go off to dinner with Georgina and he's already running late, so he has to cut out on the last fifteen minutes of _Charade_. Blair pouts at him and Dan smiles a little, apologizes only half sarcastically and leans in to kiss her. He feels her smile, hand on his cheek, and then they both realize what they're doing. They freeze; Dan looks away.

"Old habits," she says, voice going up softly in question.

It almost makes him laugh but he shakes his head slightly and says, "No, not really," tilts up to kiss her again.

"Dan –" If it's a protest, it gets lost in her kissing back. She presses her hands against his chest as though to push him back but her fingers curl in the fabric; she's so familiar pressed against him in this warm bed with that movie playing that Dan forgets Georgina, forgets revenge, forgets anger.

But Blair pulls away again. "I can't."

"Why can't you?" Dan demands, frustrated. "He's going to keep you waiting forever and I want to be with you _now_ –"

She shakes her head, sliding away from him and off the bed. "It's been too easy to forget ourselves since you've been here. That's all it was. Slipping into old habits."

"That's bullshit," Dan says firmly.

Blair laughs, soft and shaky. "Go to dinner, Dan."

"Blair –"

But she just shakes her head again, not looking at him, and says, "Go."

Dan had written a chapter about Blair as he knew her in high school. He wrote about the girl he hated and not the girl he loved, because the latter cancelled out the former too much and he let go of too many things he shouldn't have. He wrote about all the ways she hurt people and all the ways she hurt herself. He pulled no punches. He was not kind.

Georgina loves it, of course. But Dan's finding his new skin isn't settling so well and at the last minute he pulls it, sends in its place one of those shameful little summer stories.

He doesn't expect it to do anything. He's learned enough from putting himself out there in the past to know that nothing he will ever do will make her love him back. But sometimes Dan is a romantic and sometimes he's just stupid and the two together are a dangerous combination.


End file.
